ROBERT TODD

EN

A specialist in lyrical 16mm filmmaking as well as a sound and visual artist, Robert Todd continually produces short works that resist categorization. In the past twenty years he has produced a large body of short-to-medium format films that have been exhibited internationally at a wide variety of venues and festivals including the Media City Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Les Rencontres Internationales, Black Maria Film Festival, Nouveau Cinema in Montreal, Cinematheque Ontario, the Harvard Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, the Paris Biennial, Slamdance Film Festival, and others. His films have won numerous festival prizes, grants, and artist’s awards. He teaches film production at Emerson College in Boston.

26.10.17

DIALOGUES : FIGURE/GROUND

[Programme by Robert Todd]

Dialogues : Every month VISIONS invites visiting artists to curate a programme in dialogue with their own work.

"These camera driven films that are poetic in origin, and create a space that allows equal weight for the space of a subject and the space of the environment, often merging the two, or shifting the locus of subject-hood, not only perceptually, but in the imagination, and I would say metaphysically as well.

To varying degrees, they allow us to shift the hierarchy of perception away from a singular figure as the main object of consideration, allowing the eyes to roam and make “decisions”, and for the most part they maintain a contained field of action, though they often suggest a sort of dimensional travel - In the tornado scene in The Wizard of Oz, the background vies for attention as with the foreground, the background achieving a figurative power that doesn’t reduce the importance of the foreground action, but certainly determines it. In Mercurio, the actors are very gradually revealed, the build of our attention is focused on the evolving space of a magical forest of light that the human characters sit both within, and in isolation from. This kind of tension exists in a different way in ALIKI, a portrait of a blind flamingo that haunts a still marsh at sunset, where there is a question of the relation between observation and sensation, but also between interactive elements, including the active interaction between pictorial elements. Paul Turano’s SMOKESTACK offers an analytic approach to our consideration of the field of vision in these terms, bringing us back to Kansas for a closer view of the intersection between the material of the medium and its elemental referents. Those elements continue to grow and have homes of their own that remain in dialogue with the pictorial nature of the mediums they draw from, but exposing the warmth of an interior that lies within and beneath these surfaces." - RT

Mercúrio | Sandro Aguilar2010 | digital | sound | 18 mins | colour

Aliki | Richard Wiebe 2010 | digital | sound | 6 mins | colour

​Lake Aliki, Cyprus. For centuries, flamingos have wintered here from Iran. Rimbaud encountered them when he worked a quarry in Larnaca. 7th century Arabs described them to mark the burial site of Umm Haram, aunt of the Prophet Muhammad. It is said that Lazarus spent his days on the shores of this lake after his resurrection, staring into the sun to shake off the darkness of the grave. The Greeks represented flamingos in poetry, the Romans slaughtered them for their tongues. Today, a man sings:

Smokestack | Paul Turano2012 | SD | sound | 3 mins | colour

​The death throes of old energy witnessed by the innocent, inspired by the George Bataille essay "Smokestack":“I am, of course, not unaware that for most people the smokestack is merely the sign of mankind's labor, and never the terrible projection of that nightmare which develops obscurely, like a cancer, within mankind. Obviously one does not, as a rule, continue to focus on that which is seen as the revelation of a state of violence for which one bears some responsibility. This childish or untutored way of seeing is replaced by a knowing vision which allows one to take a factory smokestack for a stone construction forming a pipe for the evacuation of smoke high into the air-which is to say, for an abstraction.”- from George Bataille “Smokestack” 1929

Tape | Nick Collins| 16mm on HD | silent | 3 mins | colour

Temple of Apollo | Nick Collins2012 | 16mm | silent | 4 mins | colour

"Temple of Apollo looks at the vestigial remains of a temple to Apollo Korynthos at Agios Andreas in Messenia, Greece. The film draws on Fritz Graf’s 2008 book on Apollo. Elements from the myths surrounding the god are found, or noticed, or suggested."​- ​Andrew Vallance and Simon Payne, Contact

An Afternoon | Nick Collins2012 | 16mm | silent | 3 mins | colour

"An Afternoon pivots around a fine-mesh flyscreen, which divides interior from exterior and gives an almost pixel-like quality to the image. The film records the passage of a single afternoon and hints at a more expansive time-frame."- ​Andrew Vallance and Simon Payne, Contact

"Burning Bush is made from a series of mid fall shots of a bright 'digital' red euonymus both in real time and with video time lapses. Much of the ideas for the piece emerged during post-production. The Euonymus mid fall 'natural' leaves are startling, their colors are so saturated as to appear unreal, their purity so uniform as to appear manufactured. It has long been a fascination of mine to activate shared qualities living in parallel universes; always, that which is present in the make up of the digital cinema image and that of the physical world it is representing. Assumptions we make about the real world, the way it is recorded, or more appropriately translated, are cultural constructs. The inevitable biblical connotations of the Burning Bush refers to man made poetic as well as institutional constructs." - VG

​Filmed at the Film Farm, Ontario in 2006 and added to over time. Objects, animate and inert, were examined through viewfinder and under a microscope and goats were interviewed daily. Thoughts coaxed into light in about the order they were encountered.